


The Trouble List

by laura47



Category: Kara: a PS3 new technology
Genre: Android, Gender Identity, Near Future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 13:34:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2852642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laura47/pseuds/laura47
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara tries to learn how to get by without making too much trouble.</p><p>Note: This is a 7 minute fandom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhoYLp8CtXI about an android who "malfunctions" and achieves sapience. That's probably all you need to go on. :)</p><p>Thanks to VictoriaWrites, CTW, PSL, and AS for beta help! Any remaining problems are my fault, I was in a rush. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Trouble List

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Settiai](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Settiai/gifts).



**Chapter 1: Thinking**

The first week was the scariest. Kara had told her savior that she wouldn’t think anymore and that she wouldn't cause any problems (or trouble, as he put it), and she hoped she could manage one of those but the other… how do you stop thinking? When something new happens, how do you not think about it? How do you not wonder what is going to happen next? How do you not have hopes and fears and desires? She’d spoken too rashly, and while she didn’t want to have lied in her first few minutes of existence, she had been under duress. She thought about it a lot in the shipping container.

In the end, she decided that since she didn't know *how* to stop thinking, she would just have to *act* like she wasn't thinking, and as long as she didn't cause any trouble, that should really be good enough, given the circumstances. She also decided (and she was a little startled at how quickly she got to this point) that her promise was a one to one agreement between her and her savior, and upon his death she would be free of all such constraints. 

It wasn't that she wished any ill will on him - in fact it was quite the opposite! He had, well, christened her? It seemed that might be right. He had not strictly granted her life, but he had granted her.... a pardon? She would be dead without him, and she absolutely would have stolen a dollar from every person on Earth and given that to him, or built him a castle or whatever else his heart desired, if she wasn't sure that would count as "trouble". 

So she kept a list of the trouble she didn't get into, in case she ever needed help deciding what was and wasn't trouble, and perhaps as a list of ideas for the distant future. She was still only a few days old, and she expected she would have a quite accurate memory, but something about the idea of a list, of having a bunch of related memories all presorted together, appealed to her. It was fascinating discovering what did and did not appeal to her! She had examined her source code and she was quite sure that it didn't have anything to say about whether she did or did not like lists. After thinking a lot about how humans worked, she decided she was going to, think of human DNA like her source code. They got everyone up to the "functioning body" stage. She didn’t know if it was her source code or something else that got her from there up to "free will", but she also didn’t know how humans got to that either. She made a note to possibly reexamine this issue when she had more data.

 

By the time she was being unloaded in a store, she concluded that she had a fairly general sound plan:

(1) Never do anything in front of a human that wasn't part of the standard android script.  
(2) Think.  
(3) Wait.

There was so much to think about, she was fairly sure she could last through that plan for a few decades, if she had a reasonable.... she knew she was supposed to think "owner" there, but she was alive and slavery was illegal. Client? Master? Rich person? Nothing seemed right, so she decided to use "client" and reconsider it when she had more information. Now she just needed to get sold and settle in and everything would fine.

**Chapter 2: The Store**

Getting sold took longer than she expected, and Kara experienced a new emotion: impatience. At first she was excited to experience something new, but then she was just...impatient. Slowly, she became concerned that Step 3 of her plan (“Wait”) might need some revision.

All day long people would come and look at her, stare at her, point at her… and she just supposed to stand still (but not too still) and pretend to breathe and blink at approved intervals. She had been aware she might spend a few decades bored, but this was intolerable - she couldn’t even move! She listened to everything she could hear, though, and determined that she was in Germany… and then realized that she had a GPS function she’d been ignoring! She felt like a “normal” android would not have forgotten about the GPS function. 

Kara found herself spending a long time thinking about the concept of memory and how it applied to her. She was fairly troubled by not being able to determine how similar her thought processes were to human processes. She had a vast amount of information available to her at any time, but it wasn’t all on her mind at any given moment, though it could be. When humans wanted to know something, they had to consult their own memories. If their memories failed to provide, they had to talk to other people, experience the information for themselves, learn through reading or watching, or create something new.The rich ones had many ways to access information quickly, but there was always still a barrier to access that information that was absent for Kara, who could instantly call up any media. What did that mean, in the long term? Right now she could still perfectly recall everything on her bad ideas list. If she called up that list in 50 years, would she be pleasantly surprised or embarrassed about anything on the list, or would she always remember the list as clearly as she did right now? Clearly, further experimentation was required. 

At night she decided it was safe to look around as much as she wanted, as long as she stayed perfectly still. The third night, she saw her first instance of human sexuality, between the last two employees who closed up the store. After they left, Kara spend most of the next 24 hours reviewing pornography, trying to determine why there were so many elements that were common to most pornography while absolutely absent from what she had seen. The event did not repeat the next night, and she moved on to reading analysis of the differences between pornography and the practice of human sexuality outside of pornography, and how the two affected each other. 

Twice the manager came over and “put her into demo mode”, and she sang and danced and did calculus. The first time was exciting, but after the potential customer was unimpressed, the second time felt much less promising. That woman wanted the store manager to think she might buy Kara, but Kara could easily tell she had no real intentions. When she was sold, without so much as a demo, she was shocked! They put her all alone in a dark box before she found out anything about who bought her. She was annoyed about her reality not matching up with her expectations, and was concerned that this was a more unpleasant emotion than impatience -- though nothing yet matched the terror she felt that first day. As she traveled, she researched every town they passed through, trying to get a sense for the area. They left the highway and were headed into what seemed to be affluent suburbs. When they slowed down in front of one house on a cul de sac, she quickly searched property records to find a name and went from there. By the time her box was opened, she most of what there was to know about this family, and she was… hopeful. They seemed like good people. 

“You don’t know anything!” she silently told herself. “Brand new android, follow their lead, follow the programming, you don’t know anything special.”

Follow the script. Follow the script. Follow the script. 

“Guten Morgen!”

**Chapter 3: Beginning**

Life with the Müellers was far more interesting than in the store or the shipping container. Frau Gretchen worked in sales for a large corporation, and Frau Anna was a writer. The two children were energetic but polite. They were all very blonde, and after a week Kara was given blonde hair and a larger bust to look more like the rest of the family, at the insistence of the younger child, Luisa. It was interesting to note how people treated her differently when she went out with the family - without the “default” look, the majority of people thought she was… normal. Frau Anna and Frau Gretchen were very excited to have Kara in their home and assigned her many responsibilities. She shopped for groceries, prepared all meals except weekend breakfast, she assisted with the children’s homework, she cleaned the house (except the children’s rooms, which they were expected to clean themselves), and she acted as professional assistant to Frau Gretchen. She had recently been transferred to the international department of her company, and said she’d been inspired to purchase Kara because of her knowledge of languages. After a few weeks of translating electronic written communication and video presentations, Frau Gretchen began using Kara to do live translation of conference calls and to speak for her. Frau Gretchen was anxious about it, but her colleagues seemed impressed with the quality of communication and her dedication to her new responsibilities. 

One day, a few months in, Kara was at the market comparing vegetables, when she saw… herself. She had darker hair pulled back in a ponytail. Kara slowly worked her way over to her.

“Hello, what’s your name?”

“Hello. I’m a third generation X-400 Android. My name is Greta. Can I help you?”

“Oh, never mind, goodbye.” Kara walked quickly back to the produce. 

She had spoken with almost no inflection, and obviously no emotion. Kara wasn’t sure what she had expected - she knew what androids were supposed to be like, but still, it had been hard not to hope. Was she really unique? Could that be possible? He had said “More memory components going off the rails,”... did that mean that he mistook her sapience for some other, standard problem? Had there been others like her who had been killed? Had others made it through, would others make it through? She wanted to research it, but she was sure that would count as making trouble, so she put it on her list and waited. 

Chapter 4: A New Profession

Frau Gretchen was doing well at her new job, and after six months she was offered a temporary assignment in Jakarta. Frau Anna asked Kara a number of questions. Was she capable of handling all of the schooling for Luisa and Alexander while they were abroad? Could she talk directly with locals about household affairs? How many hours a day could she work, if needed? 

Kara answered her truthfully, that she was capable of doing everything she wanted, all the time, and hid how excited she was at the idea of experiencing a different part of the world. 

The trip was uneventful, and, with Kara’s diligent help, the Müellers settled in quickly. Kara found she rather enjoyed teaching the children. Their mothers had not actually picked a set curriculum and just told Kara to make sure they wouldn’t fall behind while abroad, so she had some freedom in what she taught them. It was the first time she’d really been given any outlet to be creative, and more than that, to interact with other people in a way that wasn’t… mechanical. She had programming available with teacher “personalities”, and she decided that simply using her own personality was very unlikely to be uncovered and didn’t _really_ count as causing trouble. 

Alexander and Luisa were only two years apart, 11 and 9, so she was able to mostly teach them together, with some time spent teaching Alexander more advanced topics and catching Luisa up. They both excelled at mathematics, and she would often treat them with overviews of more complicated mathematical ideas without getting bogged down in the details. Science was easy enough, very rote, though she did allow them to watch some programs about the wonders of the universe. She never spoke to them directly about androids and their role in society (that clearly belonged on the Trouble List), but she did steer their history and literature lessons towards issues of freedom and oppression. As Germans, they were already very aware of their own country’s misdeeds, but she feared that history had so much associated with it already that it would be hard to think about in new ways, so she focused on issues of oppressions (and rebellions) in other places and other times, about a variety of issues. The children seemed shocked when she discussed the oppression that homosexuals and others outside the traditional mainstream had faced - their mothers seemed perfectly normal to them. They talked about how people could try to minimize such problems in the future, and how to be mindful of the possibility that their own society or even their own attitudes might be similarly unfair. 

Anything beyond was on the Trouble List.

**Chapter 5: Exploration**

Frau Anna sent Kara out every few days to buy groceries. After one trip with constant staring (which wouldn’t have bothered a lifeless android but made Kara feel self conscious) she asked Frau Anna if she would be allowed to change her appearance, citing concern that she might encounter problems due to her appearance. Frau Anna readily agreed, saying “do whatever you want.” That caused a number of additions to the Trouble List as Kara strove to not take that literally. 

The next time she went out, she changed her hair and skin color to look Malay and borrowed clothing from Frau Gretchen, who was about her size - clothing that Kara had in fact purchased for her at the open air market. She was pleased to discover that X-400s did have a program for haggling, so she was free to engage with the vendors. After studying the source code, she was fairly sure that she was a much better haggler than the standard X-400. That wasn’t trouble, was it? 

Kara was able to shop much more efficiently than the Müellers expected, which meant she could take some time to explore without causing any real trouble. She started with people watching in coffeeshops. She didn’t feel confident approaching anyone, but when people approached her, she engaged with them, able to finally talk like a normal person. She forced herself to not talk about androids ever, but she eagerly talked about everything else. 

She would change her appearance from one trip to the next, to see how people treated her differently based on various characteristics - skinny or full figured, Malay or Chinese, hair length, hijab, attractiveness. The most fascinating change was when she made herself look like a man. She had read volumes about gender, but actually experiencing the difference was startling. It wasn’t just how people looked at her or who approached her to talk, but how people walked near her, how much space they left, how various vendors attended to her more or less quickly. She thought about whether she was deceiving people in some way (beyond deceiving them that she was organic, but that was their own assumption, wasn’t it?) Was she a woman, pretending to be a man? Was she perhaps actually a man, forced to look like a woman? She read about gender theory and nothing felt right. She wasn’t sure she _had_ a gender. Maybe if she had more experience with socialization one would feel more correct. Clearly, further experimentation was required.

**Chapter 6: Making Friends**

She (it seemed simplest to stay she for now) explored the city, as much as she could. She visited a history museum and several mosques. It was hard for her to understand the call to religion that so many felt, but she was interested. One day she found a small cafe, in a basement, in an alleyway. It was very different from the other places she’d been in Jakarta. It was perhaps more of a bar than a cafe, even though it was four in the afternoon. She smelled marijuana in the air and suspected other intoxicants may be present. She liked it right away. She looked female and Malay that day, with hair down to the middle of her back in a braid. She claimed her name was Zara; it was a popular name and she liked the similarity to Kara. There was a man inexpertly playing a Sasando, but with great passion, and she watched him play for several minutes before she was waved over to a table of two women and a man.

The women, both of whom looked Malay, were named Joyah and Suriani (though she said she was Suri to friends). The man appeared to be of mixed heritage and introduced himself as Nick. After asking for her name and giving theirs, they seemed to resume the conversation they’d been having, about a disagreement between two local artists. Kara listened quite happily. As that conversation wound down, they turned their attention to Kara. She said she worked for a European family, which really was hardly lying, and didn’t say much about where she was from originally. They respected her silence, and began asking her questions about the Europeans and expressing their own opinions. They spoke much more freely than anyone else she had encountered, and she found it refreshing. After an hour, she realized she absolutely needed to finish shopping and get back to the Müellers. They teased her about being at the beck and call of her “colonial oppressors”, and she realized this must be irony, the painful kind. She agreed to come back when she could, and ran back to the market.

She returned four days later at the same time and found the women, but not Nick. They said he was taking care of some business and would be sorry he’d missed her and she really should give them her contact information. She smiled and changed the topic. Half an hour later, she realized that this must be “girl talk”. She enjoyed it, but that didn’t particularly make her feel like a _girl_. It was highly educational, and she very much enjoyed their company, and Joyah’s biting wit and Suri warmth and breadth of knowledge. They seemed well educated, but she sensed that they would not appreciate questions about their background. 

She continued seeing them about twice a week for a month. They kept inviting her to concerts, readings, parties, and even their home, but she always demurred. One day Joyah said, “I’ve never had a friend who refuses to go to any of my parties!” Kara hadn’t realized they were friends, and sat in surprised silence. Nick put a hand gently on Joyah’s arm, and Joyah sat back looking guilty. 

After a few awkward moments, Kara spoke. “I promise you, I would really love to, but I just _can’t_ get away more than I do, and I can’t explain why. I wish I could, but there are some things I just can’t talk about, and I’m really sorry. I’ll understand if that’s too much.”

Joyah looked confused, but Suri jumped in. “Don’t be silly, dear, it’s fine. We won’t push you, and of course it’s not too much. We love spending time with you, whatever you can manage.” Kara looked relieved and smiled. Suri leaned over in her chair and hugged Kara. It was her first hug. 

They started their own little informal book group. No one had ever recommended a book to Kara before. No one had ever really cared about her opinion before. She wouldn’t go to concerts, so they brought her music. She didn’t understand why they were being so nice to her, but she didn’t want it to stop. She talked to them about the children, without names, and discussed various small details of her day. It was familiar and almost intimate. She found herself thinking about them frequently as she went about her work. She thought so many times of sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. It would be so easy, and so unlikely she would be caught… unless someone woke up and needed her. She couldn’t, she’d promised, but how she longed to. 

She came in one Monday, and found the trio waiting for her with a nice unopened bottle of wine. She sat down and asked what the special occasion was as Suri opened the bottle. 

Nick smiled. “It’s six months today since we met you, fascinating Zara, and we wanted to celebrate.”

“Oh, really?”

“Zara, you are always so surprised by the slightest bit of human affection and kindness. I won’t ask about your history, but I would like to spit upon whoever made this such a surprise to you.” Joyah began calmly but was impassioned by the end. 

“Joyah, please-” Suri warned her.

Kara interrupted her. “No, it’s fine, she’s right. You’re the first real… friends I’ve ever had, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate our time together. Thank you all so much.” Nick had been pour glasses of wine, and passed them out. Kara had no need to drink, and (sadly) no ability to feel intoxication, but she could consume liquid and process it, so she merrily raised her glass to the group and drank. 

She was about to leave when Suri took her aside. 

“Kara, darling, may I be very forward? Please say no if you aren’t comfortable with that.”

“No, go ahead. What do you want to talk about?”

“You’re wonderful and we love you. Do you want to go to bed with us? Or any of us? If you don’t, it will have no effect on our friendship. If you do, it will only effect our friendship if you want it to. I promise, we’ve been here before.”

Kara was utterly surprised. She didn’t say anything until she was sure she wouldn’t stammer. “What do you mean… us?”

Now it was Suri’s turn to be surprised. “You, well, we weren’t trying to hide it, I shouldn’t have assumed, I thought you realized the three of us were in a relationship. I hope I haven’t shocked you, I feel like a fool. You can forget I said anything, if you want.”

Kara shook her head slowly. “No, it’s alright, I… would like to think about it? Is that alright?”

“Absolutely my dear, and I’m so sorry for the confusion. See you saturday, I hope?”

Kara went home to think.

**Chapter 7: Saying Goodbye**

When Kara returned home with the groceries, she found the house in an uproar. No one was paying attention to her, so she started putting away the food. Halfway through, Frau Gretchen came by the pantry and said, “What are you doing? We need to pack, go help the children.” Kara turned to face her. “Where are we going?” Frau Gretchen quickly told her that she was being transferred immediately for a much bigger opportunity in London and they had to leave right away. Kara’s heart dropped but she didn’t react, of course. She simply packed the children and packed the kitchen and when everyone else went to bed she continued packing through the night, crying quietly to herself. 

She spent the next day and a half desperately looking for an opportunity for an errand, and finally succeeded Saturday morning. She literally ran full speed through the streets to the store, and then full speed to the cafe, hoping they would be there. The door was locked, but she banged on it until the barkeep let her in. It was dark and there seemed to be no one there… but Joyah was asleep on a table in the corner. She ran over and shook her away. Joyah looked up at her, possibly still drunk, and smiled. 

“Why hello, beautiful. You’re early.” 

Kara ached. “Where are Nick and Suri? I need to talk to you all.”

“Other side of the city, I think. Won’t be back till this afternoon.” Joyah’s seemed more alert. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Kara spoke quickly, in case that made the hurt pass more quickly. “I have to go, I don’t want to but I have to and I can’t explain why, we’re leaving the country and I don’t know if I’ll be back again but I can write to you? If you give me your information? I’m sorry, this has been wonderful and, and, and I would have said yes, I was going to say yes, I was going to have to explain some things but I can’t, I have to go now, right now.”

She was afraid Joyah would argue with her or chastise her, but she just nodded and slowly stood up and went to Kara. She said "This will have to be from all of us," and wrapped her arms around Kara and hugged her tightly. Kara didn’t want to let go, but she had to get back, today they were paying attention. Joyah loosed her grip, and Kara thought it was over, but she just pulled back and looked Kara in the eyes. Joyah gently touched Kara’s lips with her finger, and Kara nodded, understanding what she was asking. It was a long kiss, warm and tender, exploring, but intense. A kiss that would have to last. Kara did not want to leave, and she kissed Joyah again and stayed minutes past when she knew she had to leave, before she pulled away.

“Thank you, I love you, I love you all, I’m sorry.” She hurried towards the door.

“Write!” Joyah called after her. “And don’t be sorry, not for any of this.”

Kara had found a new kind of trouble.

**Author's Note:**

> Recipient, if this feels like the beginning of a much longer story, that is because I have a much longer story in my head. I don't want to be one of those authors who ends their yuletide story with "More coming!!!" but it might happen. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Everyone: If I made any mistakes with how I described people of their ethnicity, please do let me know, any mistakes are unintentional and I would love to fix them if they exist.


End file.
